


In Memory

by rabbitprint



Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Father-Daughter Relationship, Gen, Identity, Memorials, Tattoos
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-14
Updated: 2020-04-14
Packaged: 2021-03-01 16:48:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,379
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23640334
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rabbitprint/pseuds/rabbitprint
Summary: Side story fromAll the Time He is Given, set pre-game, Ran'jit and Minfilia, spoilers through 5.1 MSQ.In celebration of a thousand Sin Eaters slain, Ran'jit's first daughter demands a tattoo.
Comments: 8
Kudos: 18





	In Memory

After Minfilia's hundredth kill as the Oracle, Eulmore sets them both to task. She has bloodied her hands well by their account; she is a full-fledged soldier now, like any other. Being ten years old is of limited concern -- not when her predecessors have demonstrated equal lethality, and particularly not when they lose ground daily to the eaters. Even with the Oracle's latest incarnation coming into the full of her power, Norvrandt still loses more troops than there is time to retrain.

They live in a time of perpetual crisis. Survival justifies these decisions.

Together, Ran'jit and his daughter take the field with the same single-mindedness as hunting hounds, and for good reason: their enemies are always the same. Only the scenery changes. As a specialist unit, they are sent alongside every contingent of Eulmore's military, a weapon to be loaded and unloaded like any other piece of equipment. Ran'jit teaches Minfilia how to ride both chocobos and amaros out of practical necessity, keeping her perched on the saddle before him as she tentatively clutches the reins; he helps her with pressure points against nausea each time they are loaded onto the few airships which Eulmore dares to fling into eater-infested skies, decks bristling with troops and longbows in hopes of protection. They become bound to the road, bags perpetually waiting by their doors so that they are always ready whenever the next call comes.

He becomes familiar with the weight of his daughter's pack, carrying it himself more often than not as its straps tangle with his own -- so familiar that he can tell just by picking it up if she has forgotten to bring enough clothes again, blindly shoving replacement linens into the pockets even she tossed her dirty ones carelessly on the floor. The smell of stale sweat and leather layers them both like a patina as they are shipped endlessly from front line to front line in a war that never stops. The groaning of cart wheels are their ocean lullabies. They scrape grime off their skin and tie their oily hair back in braids, bathing whenever there is the rare luxury of safety for it. More than once, Ran'jit finds his daughter's combs and hair ribbons jammed into the crevices of his own bag; her used shirts become wadded balls mixed in with his own clothes, and Ran'jit sighs as he throws it all in the washtub whenever they return home.

Minfilia -- Oracle-blessed -- performs far better than any hume her age, or even twice that count over. At nearly thirty himself, Ran'jit bests his own peers with equal mercilessness; neither one of them care to be average. 

Yet she is still his little girl, as he is reminded whenever she oversleeps for the morning roll call, or when she eats half his dinner along with her own, or when she moans theatrically with a sore throat and will not stop until he brings her tea with precious honey traded from the Crystarium, whose beehives remain on shaky ground after the Flood. She is both too young and growing older too fast, attempting to discover herself while surrounded by the expectations of countless strangers -- and yet, Ran'jit cannot think of any better place to strengthen her than here, in the heart of Norvrandt's greatest military, where she will at least be safe.

* * *

The years bring them back to Eulmore gradually, allowing them to catch their breath for the luxury of half a week at times -- an entire four days, where they can sleep and wake with the strangeness of the same ceiling above them for longer than two nights in a row. The liberty is dazzling. In those moments of respite, Ran'jit can try to predict where they will be deployed next, and Minfilia can finally catch up on her studies without having to balance a book on the back of an amaro. 

They are both late for their evening training session when she broaches the demand -- Minfilia from failing to complete her assigned coursework, Ran'jit from catching up on the latest reports from the field -- so that even though they have ended up working in his quarters, it is long past the time when either of them should have headed down to the mats. Minfilia had commandeered his bed instead of a desk so that she could finish her written assignments, spreading the books open haphazardly across his thin mattress and using his pillow for a footrest. He had taken up similar space over two tables, jamming them together in order to scrutinize an enormously detailed map of Amh Araeng. 

Dinner had already come and gone, plates delivered to his quarters as they had absently picked through the meals, leaving a wreckage of fish bones and onions to congeal on a side table. At this rate, they would both miss the best hours for washup -- hot water at a premium still, even with the fire crystals they had traded from the dwarves last summer to help bolster Eulmore's poor insulation -- and would have to hope for whatever dredges remained. 

He can tell when Minfilia has lost all patience for her labors, even before she begins to kick restlessly against the bed in a heavy, insistent rhythm. "Must I _really_ finish this?" she asks, for the dozenth time. "It's not like anyone's going to check it. We're scheduled to be on the road tomorrow ere the third bell. My tutors certainly _won't_ be there to criticize my score. Besides," she adds tartly, "when will I _ever_ meet an eater who demands I perform _arithmetic_ for them?" 

She has a point; Ran'jit cannot imagine what level of insanity such a situation would require. "You need not become an expert, Minfilia." Straightening up, he stretches both arms wide, feeling the ache in his shoulders from sitting hunched over for too long. "But you _must_ know enough to keep from being fooled by those who _are_. A logistics officer may lie on their figures to cover up a mistake. An airship captain may rattle off numbers claiming that an unlucky headwind will risk you being caught by eaters, when in truth 'tis because they merely wish to sleep in late the next morning. Or the error may be an innocent one, born of a single misplaced number -- yet soldiers will still die because of it. Sin Eaters are not our only dangers," he continues, glancing back down at the table and sliding another map out, matching it up against a digsite near Twine. "Living people can be even worse."

His daughter sighs, rolling onto her back and staring up mournfully at the ceiling in surrender, murdering his pillow with her heels. Ran'jit eyes her doubtfully before turning his attention back to his work -- but his own concentration is completely ruined as well. Try as he might, the only thing he can see on the maps are delays and boredoms, best suited for some distant point in the future that he can consider later.

Before he can think of a decent excuse to call the night over, leaving the routes to another day, Minfilia speaks up again. 

"There's something I want to commemorate, Father," she states abruptly, with no forewarning. Her hands are laced over her belly; her thumbs tap contemplatively against each other. "Will you let me?"

Ran'jit glances up from staring disapprovingly at a chokepoint directly in the middle of a new supply route; if _he_ were a Sin Eater, he would surely strike there. "Commemorate what? Being lazy? Skipping your language lessons?"

" _No_ , Ran'jit," she says, rolling her eyes pointedly, as if he has just suggested that the best way to kill a Forgiven Conceit is with a rock. "I slew my thousandth eater while we were in Lakeland -- give or take a dozen. I'd like something to remember it by. And then once more again, to note every hundred mark after. May I?"

He frowns. Not from disapproval; he'd thought she was at least two hundred short. Suddenly bereft of enough time to plan, he fumbles for the few ideas he'd come up with already. "Do you wish to learn a weapon style of some sort? Or refresh your current armaments -- "

"A tattoo."

He cannot flip the bed entirely over -- his chair is in the wrong position to provide enough leverage -- but his daughter shrieks when Ran'jit gets a foot on the frame and shoves it up in a lurch, sliding her against the wall. The wooden legs skid; Minfilia flings herself in a grab for the bedframe's edge to keep her own weight from collapsing the furniture the rest of the way. 

Ran'jit watches her with one eyebrow quirked before finally dropping his foot, and allowing the bed to slam back onto the floor, hearing the crunch of some delicate wooden strut now gone to the grave. 

The pages of her classwork flutter haphazardly through the air, like leaves shaken from a dying branch. Yet -- surprisingly, for all her disdain -- Minfilia spots one and dives for it with a yelp, scrambling half-off the bed in frantic desperation, stretching out an arm despite how badly it unbalances her.

He is faster -- but only barely, getting a toe on the paper and whisking it towards him just as she makes a missed grab. He scoops it up with a curious frown, which only deepens as he sees the monster scrawled upon the page. He has not seen its like before. If it is a new kind of Forgiven, then he cannot imagine where it might have come from. Derived from pixies, mayhap. Very unlucky ones.

"What madness is this," he asks calmly, reasonably, as if he has not just attempted to fold up his daughter into the masonry. 

She is undeterred, even as embarrassment colors her cheeks. "I would like a _tattoo_ ," she repeats, as fierce and proud as he has unfortunately raised her to be. "We've the artists for it here, in Eulmore. If the cost is of concern, I can seek out marks like any other Clan hunter -- or, mayhap, some traders may need guarding. I should suffice for _that_." 

"My daughter will _not_ fight for pay like a disposable _mercenary_ ," is Ran'jit's automatic response, willfully ignoring the fact that the military keeps them on stipend anyway. "And besides, you are only thirteen," he continues, which seems like a very poor defense when the longest-lived Oracle was only two years older. "It is far too soon to make that sort of decision."

Minfilia hauls herself up defiantly, her shoulders squared. "Weren't _you_ even younger when you got your first one, Father?" 

Inwardly, Ran'jit curses himself for ever letting her glimpse the ink. "That was different. It was _necessary_ for summoning the power of Gukumatz," he protests. "Not some winged _eyeball_. What beast _is_ this? Does it even have a name? Why would you want something like this upon your body?"

Yet his daughter goes curiously silent at the chance to further explain herself, directing her stare back towards the page in Ran'jit's grip even as her hands open and close in clear ambition: willing to try and snatch her treasure back, even when he is already on his guard.

He exhales with a groan, and then finally shoves himself out of his chair, feeling the lateness of the hour turning his muscles stale. "You are too big for me to pick up by your ankles anymore, Minfilia," he tells her sternly -- and does it anyway, tipping her upside-down as she shrieks in mock indignation and nearly breaks his nose with her heel. 

He dumps her back on the mattress, where her restored smile can meet a faceful of papers. "Keep studying, girl," he warns. "The eaters may not care about your ability to perform arithmetic, but our soldiers will live and die by how many weapons come to their hands, and how much food and medicine we can transport to them. But that's enough labor for the both of us today. Come, and let's test if you're still too slow on that kick I showed you last week. If you plan to use it on the eaters tomorrow, you'll have to at least learn how to bruise me with it first."

* * *

She doesn't give up, however. With a stubbornness that he is equally guilty of having taught her, Miniflia refuses to let herself become distracted by any number of practical matters, such as mastering a new strike for shattering someone's clavicle. She draws winged circles idly in the sands of Cracked Shell Beach, and steals an inkwell to squiggle dots on the back of her arm. After they return from a successful campaign routing the eaters back through the Duergar Mountains, Ran'jit sees her scribbling the first monster again outright instead of working on her histories, shoving the paper guiltily under her books once she spots him glancing in her direction.

He addresses the matter before it can continue to foment rebellion, tossing the laundry he had been folding right back into the basket with the rest. "What drives you to remain so attached to that thing, Minfilia? I would have remembered fighting such a beast. It cannot have been an eater you have faced, let alone your thousandth mark."

Minfilia's eyes dart back down to where she had hidden the page, as if debating if she can still deny the whole matter altogether. Finally, she pulls her resolve firm. "Do you remember when I had trouble sleeping last year, Father? I had those awful dreams about monsters chasing me endlessly through Eulmore, up and down the stairs, squeezing through the halls like rubber. Goobbues, but _horrible_ ones, crushing everything beneath them. Glowing eyes everywhere, with thousands of teeth. They were _terrifying_."

"I remember." Ran'jit's brow knits as he thinks back to the summer before; the nightmares had arrived and vanished with little explanation. Normal childhood terrors, others had advised him. Nothing more. "I assumed it was from too much training out by the Bright Cliff, fighting maultasches."

His daughter nods gamely, though her mouth is still pinched into a wavering line, tight at the corners in a distress she cannot entirely conceal. "One night, I dreamed there was a light down one of the halls -- not like the sky at all, but _softer_ somehow. Kinder. When I ran to it, there was a woman there. She looked like me, but older." Timidness has never been a frequent visitor to Minfilia's face; it reigns there now, fumbling all her words for her like a neophyte dropping all of their knives upon the floor. "When she patted me on the head, I felt safe. There was this... warmth, and then it seemed as if I wasn't in Eulmore at all anymore, but some other city, one I've never seen before. There were flashes of other things, banners and people and clothes, all with different marks on them. Like that one." 

She bites her lip, pausing long enough that Ran'jit's sense of alarm prickles. There is a twist beginning in her voice, like a spring being wound tighter and tighter with each syllable, until its inevitable snap. 

"After that, the bad dreams began to fade, until they just stopped one day. I think maybe... that it was the Oracle of Light that I saw. The first Minfilia. The _real_ one." 

The tale is enough to leave Ran'jit silent. It is understandable that his daughter wonders about her history. The first Oracle is to her what Ran'jit's lost homeland is to him -- a myth, a story, the full truth known only to the dead. All he knows of his heritage is himself and his father, and the empty nights alone as he waited for his father's patrols to end, trying to prepare food with what they had in their quarters and teaching himself ways to occupy the silence. He never became fluent in what should have been his first tongue, and even now Ran'jit forgets what little he learned. It is a language only given to his ghosts, voiced in his thoughts where the pronunciations grow softer and slurred with each year: _uchi, hashi, haha_.

Yet the stamps of their inheritances remain undeniably upon them both, marking the ways in which Norvrandt forever perceives them. Their names. Their faces, belonging to people they never knew. Their eyes. The ways in which they fight. Legacies they each belong to, which can never be claimed in full. 

It is a curse which is even heavier upon his daughter. However her current incarnation will be remembered in history, it will be merely as a placeholder, validated solely for her ability to be the Oracle -- and worthless otherwise.

And, in Eulmore's books, an Oracle who ever decided to give up the fight was no Oracle at all.

Ran'jit hesitates, and then plunges ahead. "Do you feel judged against her?"

His daughter's head jerks up sharply, as if startled that he could identify the cause, let alone cut straight to it. Then she firms her jaw, and nods. "By everyone. Even _you_ wonder, don't you, Father? If I'm as good as she was." Taking a breath, Minfilia meets his bluntness with her own. "Or if I'm a poor reincarnation of the Oracle this time, born _weak_ , and Eulmore should just hurry up and get a new one because I can't -- I can't _fly_ , or turn Sin Eaters into crystal with a wave of my hand, or anything else the _real_ Minfilia must have been capable of. That maybe I'm not," she falters, showing her teeth in a grimace as she struggles through the shame boiling through her -- only to fail and drop her gaze back to the floor. "I'm not Minfilia _enough_."

He will not do her the disservice of lying. He _has_ thought about her performance -- but only because it has been shoved in his face every day, along with measurements and accounts of the Oracle's first two reincarnations. Every senior officer wishes an account of how her current growth is charted. How many eaters she has slain. How many more she can be counted on to kill, and if she will need additional support in the field, lest their ranks die if she cannot hold the line. They are the coldest of statistics, valued by those who have never seen his daughter cry, let alone bleed.

And yet all those explanations -- all those _justifications_ \-- will mean nothing to a child hoping for an absolute _yes_ or _no_ , and knowing it will never come.

"Minfilia," he says, which is a mistake when he sees her shoulders hunch, tense with misery.

But there is no better name he can give her that would not be equally cruel. Not with all the expectations shoved upon her by the whole of Norvrandt, the ones they will not allow her to forget with each fresh demand for help. So long as the Oracle remains the sole beacon of hope for their world, his daughter can never escape the burden of lives being shackled around her throat.

Instead, Ran'jit shoves the laundry basket aside, striding over to where Minfilia sits, huddled and despairing with her hands tucked into tight fists on her lap. She is too tall for him to kneel, and too short for him to hold easily like this -- but he does his best as he wraps an arm around her shoulders anyway, stroking her hair just like he had every time she had woken from those selfsame dreams, shuddering with a fear that neither of them could understand.

"You are real enough for me," he says quietly. "I will hear no soul claim otherwise."

Then -- before sentimentality can further betray him -- Ran'jit hefts her up suddenly out of her chair, swinging her around in a wide circle that nearly knocks over a desk. "Very well, misbegotten child," he relents, setting Minfilia down carefully upon her bed. "Next year, we will have your tattoo done. But no sooner," he adds, holding up a finger to forestall her latest protest. "We still have the summer months to get through, and those are always the worst with all the farmers out in their fields. We must guard them 'til the harvests are over, or else Eulmore and its neighbors will starve. Too, there are troubling spots of eater activity in Amh Araeng, judging from these reports. We will have the work done after winter, once the weather begins to warm. The fiends are always at their most sluggish then, and we wouldn't want an injury to interfere with your healing. Do I have your agreement?"

"Next year!" Having a chance to complain again rallies her; emboldened by contrariness, Minfilia scowls. "I'll be _ancient_ then, Father. My skin will be too _wrinkled_ for the ink."

He flips a blanket over her head to smother her, and she squeals in muffled outrage -- but he can tell that she's pleased once she finally gets her head free again, snuggling deeper in the covers with a little squirm of delight that she's never outgrown since childhood. 

"You should get one with me, Father," she suggests next, before he can steer her thoughts away from further temptation. "And then each time I add to my trophies, you could too. We could celebrate together that way."

He's prepared to protest for this, as well -- but strangely, the idea is less objectionable than he expected. "If so, then I should not wear your Oracle's crest," he points out. "That belongs to you alone, child. I have no such powers against the Light."

Minfilia makes a thoughtful, drawn-out hum, tilting her head as she studies him. "I'll think of something else by then," she insists, and slaps her hands down on the covers, demanding his full attention once more. "You promise? Once winter is through?"

"Only if you don't choose something ridiculous for me to wear, girl," Ran'jit warns, envisioning caricatures of goggle-eyed gigantenders posing ludicrously in processions down his forearm. "Now, get some rest."

She laughs and doesn't answer -- only nestling herself back down against her pillow -- and he tugs the blankets properly over her feet, and bids her good night.

* * *

By the time the next year finally arrives, his daughter is already gone.

* * *

He finds the sketch when he is cleaning out his travel pack that summer, emptying it down to the barest threads in preparation for replacing it; the claws of a smilodon had shredded it nearly in half. Eulmore has him traveling all across Norvrandt again, fighting on every battlefront from Scree to the Citia Swamps. The Oracle may be lost for now, but they still have a use for him.

The study journal is wedged in one of the side pockets, so deeply flattened along the seam that he'd missed it in all the careless moons he'd spent automatically filling his pack and emptying it again. His daughter's handwriting slopes across the leather cover. He dislodges it carefully, its spine soft and broken from rough handling, the pages stained from meals and mud and rain.

He does not expect the surge of memories to hit him as keenly as it does, simply from touching the book -- but they rise up regardless, swift enough that they choke his throat and strangle him from within, as if every one of his daughter's smiles has been turned into a stone filling his lungs, every one of her laughs into a nail being hammered into his ribs. He is not ready for them. He will never _be_ ready. All he can do is to stop and shudder in place, his eyes too full of sorrow to see. 

When Ran'jit finally manages to crack the journal open, half of a flower slides out and drops towards the ground.

He catches it on reflex alone, feeling the ruined plant crackle between his fingers. The blossom is in poor shape. It had not been dried properly, squashed between pages to try and absorb the moisture rather than allow the air to dehydrate it. Its remaining petals are crumpled, browning with age and damage. The drawing itself is crude, amateurish, but he can tell what it is intended to look like: a flower at the height of its bloom with two arcs of leaves flanking it, left open at the base. In the corner of the page, there is a second, smaller sketch, with more flowers added beneath: one for every malmstone that Minfilia would have passed, like a chain of ivy fountaining down Ran'jit's skin, marking him in parallel as Minfilia would have -- _should_ have -- been.

He touches the words written haphazardly at the bottom of the page, and then seeks out the artists on the lower floors.

His skin has already been heavily touched by needle and ink, his back and arms covered with the intricate stamp of Gukumatz's claim upon him. The spell is part of his body; the dragon paints him with its own colors. Crimson and onyx scales dance in swirling currents along Ran'jit's shoulderblades. Its tail curls in spirals across his spine. Talons fan along his pectoral muscles, speckling him like thorns.

But there are spaces left yet untouched by Gukumatz. Ran'jit's belly, his legs, the rest of his skin. The radius around his heart. The bone of his sternum plates over the spot like armor, refusing to break. He has never taken a scar across it; no Sin Eater has ever come close.

It is a fitting choice of placement. He will carry the tally for them both there now: a new record not of his daughter's victories, but of their losses together.

He claps his hand upon his chest when asked for the location, and sits down without hesitation. The tattooist considers the choice, and gives him a shrewd frown. "The bone is closest to the skin there," she warns. "It will hurt."

"It already has," is Ran'jit's clipped reply.

Taking the cue, the artist simply nods, and picks up the journal page for study. "And you wish for it to look exactly like this sketch, with no cleanup? This, I can deliver. A flower, correct?"

Ran'jit leans back to wait for the preparations, staring up at the stonework of the ceiling as he remembers the label scrawled beneath Minfilia's sketch.

"For my daughter," he says. "A wild rose."


End file.
